This Neck of the Woods

I had forgotten. I had forgotten how you can’t see anything here. Even in the hills, which in the west promise vistas and sweeping feelings of honesty and cleanliness, in the Appalachians are all about shroud. Misty mornings, damp evenings, light filtered through whatever it is that hangs in the air, moisture, pollen, insects, scent. Walking through a field in the mid-morning, you can feel the heat coming up out of the snarl of vegetation next to the path, the hot, early exhalation of plants. My god, all those plants. There is no bare ground. Every square inch is covered, adding to the shroud effect. Shadows and secrets. The mind swallows up the past like some kind of vitamin.

My first three days back at school I spent in a fog of confusion, trying to navigate the campus, which was nestled up in the hills outside Asheville. It felt oriented all wrong. Where I thought the river should be was a trail to Suicide Ridge. Where I thought the trails should be was the college farm. I panted my way through campus, over the footbridge, down the hill to the river, where I hoped to swim. Finding the water coffee colored, I re-thought that.

Instead I hiked along the river trail, deep into the woods. I hiked until I found complete silence. I stopped and looked out on horse pastures lined by tangles of weeds, the only movement a single swallowtail moving from flower to flower. I swore I could see the heat.

I walked all the way round the farm, past the native plant sanctuary and the corn (eighteen inches taller than me) and back up to my dorm cell. I’d stop in my tracks at the sound of an evening frog, that lonely horn. At night, I turned off the fan, lay still and listened. As my husband once put it: “This place is loud!” Indeed. Even before seven in the morning the cicada are on the rise, a spiraling sound I have long associated with heat and sweat, two sensations which absolutely slow me down, almost to a halt. I can’t function. Did I really finish high school here? And then attend four years of college? Do homework?  Read? Because twenty years later this is a landscape that I cannot ignore. It wraps its heavy hands around me, refuses to let me call home, or make chit-chat with new people. All day every day, I was the only one who kept chanting,  “Dear god, it’s so hot!” The others were up and dressed, ready to go, while I pulled on tank tops, flip-flops and tied my hair in a knot off my neck. “You dress like a lumber jack,” somebody said (we were all writers, operating under our own tell-it-like-it-is etiquette). It was a wonder, I thought, that I dressed at all. Between classes, I’d shower and sit naked in front of a fan, at my desk, typing. That was new.

Because I was in school, and school is necessarily cerebral, some new friends and I took the bus to town for a massage. It felt downright sinful, to be massaged in the middle of all that heady intake of information. Every day we sat in padded folding chairs for over an hour, listening to lectures. Or in a freezing cold, air conditioned auditorium for classes on objective correlative, the importance of omission, crowding the comic stage and the merits of ‘work fiction.’ Good stuff, all of it, but how strange, how preposterous to be in this neck of the woods and yet so completely unaware of it, moving through the days without any real mingling with the landscape.

After it rained, I did get in that river. I was shocked to find it warm! There had been a heat wave and weeks of drought. I thought I’d try the campus pond, where I had seen kids swinging on a rope swing. If it was spring fed, I reasoned, it would have to be cold. But when I got to the dock, drenched in sweat, I found the water still as stone, and filled with green particles. I couldn’t do it.

Even after I felt like I knew where I was, I never got used to not being able to see anything. My decade and a half in the Rocky Mountain west meant that I had become, indeed, someone else. I wanted so badly to run into the ghost of who I used to be. Is this weird? Self absorbed? Regardless, it never happened. Too many turns in the road? Too many losses? Births? My roles are so ridiculously different from that odd, dreaming kid I used to be. Most often, when I felt close to finding her, or at least stood in a place I knew she’d have liked, I responded to her as a parent, some kind of benevolent guide. I went to hear a band play, leaned against the pool table in back with a drink in my hands, listening, tapping a foot. I would have come here. A cement-floor dive with horse-shoe pits out back. A band of three, turned up way too loud, so loud you can’t hear any lyrics, but who cares? Because the bass is so good and the kid on slide guitar is so tall and it all just sounds so good, the drink, the volume, the rhythm of this place. By the end of the night I’d be laughing so hard I could barely breathe, crawling around the campus soccer fields under a full moon, hysterically telling stories with people I’d known for under a week. Like I used to do.

I guess this means that I feel for who I used to be. Last week I put a hand on her shoulder and said, It will be all right. It’s all going to turn out all right. You will be fine.

You will be fine.